Are you still on the fence about cloud? Cloud is a major change to your technical infrastructure, and the decision to use it needs careful consideration. Here are the things you should think about.

Cloud Isn’t An All or Nothing Decision

You can lower the stress of your cloud decision by realizing you don’t need to commit all of your workloads to cloud. In fact, you probably shouldn’t commit all of your workloads to cloud. Gartner suggests considering the benefits of cloud for each workload along with the risks; depending on how those balance out, you might choose public cloud, private cloud, a small cloud experiment, or keeping the workload in-house.

Plus even after you’ve decided to go with cloud, you don’t need to go with a big bang approach to cloud migration. Doing a trial and migrating one workload at a time, with a pause before the next migration to allow you to evaluate the lessons learned, lets you rethink your decisions and approach before going all-in with cloud.

Thinking About Whether to Use Cloud

One of the most important factors in deciding whether to place applications is security and compliance. While the security risks of the cloud have often been overstated, and cloud environments are often certified to meet industry standards, companies remain reluctant to trust highly sensitive information to the cloud. Choosing on-premises is still a reasonable choice for data and applications that handle confidential customer data or intellectual property.

The difficulty of migrating the application to the cloud is another important consideration. License considerations may make it to expensive to move an application to the cloud, and legacy application architectures may not be properly structured to take advantage of the scalability available in the cloud. And while cloud is often a favored location for big data projects, getting large volumes of data to the cloud can be more costly and time-consuming than can be justified.

The cloud is often a good choice for workloads that are expected to have increased demand in the future. If you have a new workload and haven’t invested in on-premises resources, the cloud can also be a good choice for workloads that have a short anticipated life or for which demand is expected to shrink. Remember, the cloud supports scaling down as easily as scaling up! Be sure to consider network load and performance along with the availability of storage and compute resources.

While the reliability of the cloud makes it a good workhorse for supporting tried and true applications, the cloud is also a good choice for experimenting with new technology. Free trial options, paying only for what you use, and the ability to bring up and shut down instances and processes offer tremendous flexibility for businesses to test out the effectiveness of new tools.

If your IT resources are limited, cloud use may be justified based on the availability of support from the vendor. Limited budgets can also justify cloud, though costs need to be assessed in detail, as cloud isn’t always the cheapest option.

Prescient Solutions offers complete cloud support to businesses in the Chicago and Schaumburg areas. Our IT consulting and managed services leverage our Microsoft Partner status, advanced certifications, and Azure expertise to help companies make the right cloud decision and achieve top IT performance whether building infrastructure in the cloud or on premises.